As many have noted, technology – specifically, email
accounts – played a central role in the ongoing scandal involving the
resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. "Harassing" emails sent
to socialite Jill Kelley led to the FBI's discovery of emails that revealed
Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell; other emails led to the discovery of
questionable exchanges between Kelly and another top-ranking official, General
John R. Allen; subsequent searches found classified documents on the hard
drives of individuals who weren't authorized to have them.
With the indispensible assistance of the media,
reverberations have been ricocheting furiously up and down the corridors of
power and gossip from Washington and Langley to Florida, Afghanistan, and Libya
since the scandal broke last Friday. It's not the first time these elements
have combined to produce a sensation, but it’s the messiest we've seen lately.
The Petraeus scandal demonstrates the dynamics of a
phenomenon known in organization theory as the "tightly coupled
system." The concept was introduced by Charles Perrow in his 1999 book,
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk
Technologies. Computer programmers
use the term to
describe systems in which central processing units share some or all of the system’s memory
and input/output resources.
The elements at play in
the Petraeus scandal are more heavily weighted toward the human than the
examples Perrow deals with in his book, which include nuclear and petrochemical
plants, airplanes, mines, and weapons systems. Nonetheless, because his
emphasis is so strongly systemic, and because the systems in question always
rely on some combination of technology and human beings, his ideas can be
fairly applied.
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| Interconnections too complicated to imagine |
As the name implies, tight coupling describes a system in
which an intimate connection exists, intentionally or not, between its
component parts. This connection creates a potentially volatile interdependence
as changes in one element of the system quickly reverberate throughout, setting
off a chain reaction of associated effects. A simple example is a freeway at
rush hour, when a stalled car in one lane causes a backup that stretches for
miles.
The stalled car example demonstrates, as does the Petraeus
scandal, that in tightly coupled systems small events can quickly mushroom into
crises on a different order of magnitude. After-the-fact accident analyses, Perrow says,
consistently reveal "the banality and triviality behind most catastrophes."
Perrow writes somewhat ruefully that all too often it's the
human factor that introduces the fatal flaw into technological systems that
are, because of their complexity, already primed for error. "Time and
again warnings are ignored, unnecessary risks taken, sloppy work done,
deception and downright lying practiced," he says. "Routine
sins" plus technology equal "very nonroutine" consequences.
Perrow also stresses that, as careful as we think we are,
it's impossible to anticipate every consequence of any action taken within a
tightly coupled system – the potential reverberations are beyond our
comprehension. What we see isn't only unexpected, he adds, it's often, at least
for awhile, "incomprehensible." This can be true either because we're
not aware of the consequences as they gather momentum, or because we're aware
of them but can't bring ourselves to believe they're really happening. One
assumes the principles in the Petraeus scandal have experienced both
conditions.
Note: An earlier
essay in this space discussed the part that the dynamics of
tightly coupled systems played in the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
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"Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor
of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to
everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is
no such thing as a free lunch.
Photo Credit: Washington Post/ISAF via Reuters; Image, physicsworld.com
©Doug Hill, 2012
